A Contemporary Christian Reference Site for Post-Modern, Post-Evangelic Doctrine and Discussion

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – anon

Certainly God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14)

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Christmas Advent in a Cold Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer awoke December 25, 1943 on a hard wooden bed. It was the first of two Christmases he would spend sequestered in a Nazi prison.

This first Christmas would be celebrated in a lonely prison cell in a place called Tegel. He had been there for nine months, and he would be there for nine more until he was transferred to his final home, a Nazi concentration camp.

Bonhoeffer had hoped to be released for the holiday, but that was contingent on his personal lawyer who proved unreliable. His hope of spending Christmas with his family quickly evaporated into the cold silence, and his only connection with his parents would come through letters.

Inside Tegel

In the Tegel prison, Bonhoeffer and his 700 fellow inmates were treated as criminals irrespective of trials and verdicts. The men were underfed and verbally harassed, and frequently the warden refused to turn the lights on, adding to the dark and depressive spirit of the place. Bonhoeffer was assigned to a cell surrounded by prisoners awaiting execution. He writes about often being kept awake at night by the clanking chains of the cots as the unsettled, condemned men tossed and turned.1

But it was within this suffocating suffering that Christmas seemed to take a deeper meaning for the 37-year-old pastor-scholar. “A prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent,” he wrote to a friend. "One waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside."2

Two Sides to Christmas

For Bonhoeffer, there are two sides to Christmas. There is a hopeless precursor side to Advent. Until God arrives, we have no hope for release from this imprisonment of our own sin. We are stuck and condemned, and the door is locked from the outside. We depend completely on Someone from the outside to free us.

And yet on the other side of Christmas, on the other side of the birth of Christ the King, we find suffering remains. We find freedom and hope, but the suffering is not washed away. As Martin Luther says, “God can be found only in suffering and the cross.”3 It is in the suffering of the Son of God that we find God.

From his birth in a despised manger, to his death on the cross, the Son of God suffered. Christ was acquainted with pain (Isaiah 53:3). And because Christ was familiar with it, we too are made familiar with suffering (2 Corinthians 1:5, 1 Peter 4:13).

The wisdom of God in the suffering of his Son baffles us. Christ became weak and vulnerable in order to suffer for us in his full payment of our sin (Philippians 3:9). What this means is that the child of God suffers, but not because God has withdrawn from him, but because God has drawn close. We are united to Christ and we share in his sufferings (Philippians 3:10).

A Christmas More Meaningful and Authentic

Which brings me to Bonheoffer’s Christmas letter from the Tegel prison to his parents Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer on December 17, 1943. In it he asks that they not worry or fret about their separation. He will find joy in their enjoyment of the holiday. They will feast together, and he will feast on the memories of precious Christmases past.

At one point, Bonhoeffer writes this:

Viewed from a Christian perspective, Christmas in a prison cell can, of course, hardly be considered particularly problematic. Most likely many of those here in this building will celebrate a more meaningful and authentic Christmas than in places where it is celebrated in name only.

That misery, sorrow, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God than according to human judgment; that God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away; that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn — a prisoner grasps this better than others, and for him this is truly good news.

And to the extent he believes it, he knows that he has been placed within the Christian community that goes beyond the scope of all spatial and temporal limits, and the prison walls lose their significance. . . .

With great gratitude and love,

Your Dietrich4

Suffering Brings Meaning to Christmas

Ironically, we can miss this meaning of Christmas if our celebration is only wrapped up in comfortable warm fires and the fellowship of friends and family. We can miss the memory of our desperation that required the Son of God to suffer for us. We can miss the personal desperation met in the manger. And we can miss out on the fellowship of his sufferings.

As we have recently explored, Christmas and suffering are deeply interwoven themes in Scripture. Personal suffering brings deeper meaning to Christmas. And in a season of suffering, the child of God discovers that he suffers not because God has drawn away, but because God has drawn close to us convicts, drawn close through a manger, drawn closer to us than the hard prison cell walls of a cold Nazi prison.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Translate

Search This Blog

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profoundanguish in his [or her] heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass through them they sound like beautiful music." - Soren Kierkegaard

When we say to the poet or singer-song writer, "Sing to us," what we're really saying is "May your poem or song help us put our suffering into words that might connect us to life again. That we might be able to begin the hard work of mourning and no longer live as dead people in desperate despair. Words that might help us face our loss with others who could share in our burden and no longer live alone in the brokenness of pain and darkness."

How to use this blog...

Welcome. This is an evolving story of the Christian faith of the 21st Century - how it might look, breathe and feel. This blogsite is specifically focused on developing what a postmodern, postevangelic Christian orthodoxy may look like. One that is generous and missional.

Articles have been alphabetically arranged by topic and by date via the sidebars and a more limited "Index" area further below (sic, "Blogger" does not provide an indexing database per se). Scrolling through each topic will discover an evolving discussion that has matured since inception.

This site is best searched by Google using "relevancy22 + topic of interest" as the format. However, the search bar provided above on this blogsite might also be helpful. Each topic

has been built in interrelated correspondence with the other as reflective of interrelated doctrinal areas.

Subscribe To

Follow by Email

Destroyer of Worlds

"Biblical criticism is perennially caught between the Scylla of interpretive freedom and the Charybdis of irrelevance. Too much hermeneutic freedom and the tradition disintegrates, losing its epistemological appeal. Too little interpretive freedom and the Bible becomes merely an irrelevant historical artifact, rather than the living word of God." Inherently, evangelical biblical interpretation is unquestionably caught between a need for relevance and the need for textual validity.

Without creativity we are not just condemned to a life of repetition, but to a life that slips backwards.The biggest failures of our lives are not those of execution, but failures of imagination.We are all inventors of our own future and creativity is at the heart of every invention.

A collection of essays in exploration of the divine and life of community

"Test everything. Hold fast to that which is true.” (1 Thess 5.21)

I wandered unto the templed mountains of Thy holy hills and there found My Redeemer...

Jesus is the best guide to God’s character.... That said, we must interpret Scripture through the lens of Jesus.... And in light of Jesus’ teachings about love, we cannot believe in a God of hate or celebrate violence. As such, we must revise certain traditional views of God’s wrath and hell in light of the testimony of Jesus.

Earth. Our Most Precious Resource.

The Land Ethic

Mark Twain once said, “Buy land, they’ve stopped making it.”

Obtaining and preserving land is important because we only have the resources we’ve been given. If no one bothers to preserve land then society will continue covering it with concrete structures until there is nothing left to cover up.

Many of us Michiganders like to believe that our lakes are bottomless, our forests are never-ending, our skies endlessly clear and blue. But it’s with this assumption that we misuse fragile lands instead of tending to their health.

Education is the best way to combat this mindset. We need to teach the next generation that the true value of our land isn’t measured in dollars and cents. An acre of forest is worth more than just a blank space on the map. An acre of forest is a wellspring of wonder. It’s a playground for all the irreplaceable plants and animals that make up the cycle of life.